Google 'Doubles Down' on Pixel Hardware, Cuts Google Assistant Support (arstechnica.com) 29
A new report from The Information details more changes Google CEO Sundar Pichai's budget cuts are having across the company, with some divisions surviving and others getting ominous resource cuts. From a report: First, we have news that the hardware division, other than losing laptops, seems mostly safe. Google's biggest Android partner, Samsung, is in decline in many established markets, and Apple is hitting an all-time high in US market share last quarter. The report says Google views Apple as more of a problem than it has in the past, thanks to worries that regulators might shut down the usual multi-billion-dollar Google/Apple agreement to put Google Search on iPhones. If iPhones stop showing Google ads, the rise of Apple and fall of Samsung is one of the few things that could actually be a major problem for Google's revenue.
According to the report, Google views itself as the solution to this problem. As a hedge against what the report calls the "further decline" of Samsung, Google is "doubling down" on its investment in Pixel hardware. Google is apparently doing this by "moving product development and software engineering staff working on features for non-Google hardware to work on Google-branded devices." The goal here is to not spend more money, so Google is apparently sacrificing partner devices to focus on the Pixel division. So what projects are seeing cuts? Google TV is one, with the report saying: "Executives also have discussed moving some product managers working on Google TV software for television sets" to Wear OS and the Pixel Tablet. This is the only OS called out as specifically receiving less OS development. A lot of this report seems to focus on cuts to Google Assistant's support for specific form factors, which is strange since Google Assistant is more or less the same on every platform. The whole point of the Assistant is one reliable, predictable voice assistant that lives everywhere, and it's not clear what platform-specific support needs to be done other than whipping up an app that can receive audio and read back results.
According to the report, Google views itself as the solution to this problem. As a hedge against what the report calls the "further decline" of Samsung, Google is "doubling down" on its investment in Pixel hardware. Google is apparently doing this by "moving product development and software engineering staff working on features for non-Google hardware to work on Google-branded devices." The goal here is to not spend more money, so Google is apparently sacrificing partner devices to focus on the Pixel division. So what projects are seeing cuts? Google TV is one, with the report saying: "Executives also have discussed moving some product managers working on Google TV software for television sets" to Wear OS and the Pixel Tablet. This is the only OS called out as specifically receiving less OS development. A lot of this report seems to focus on cuts to Google Assistant's support for specific form factors, which is strange since Google Assistant is more or less the same on every platform. The whole point of the Assistant is one reliable, predictable voice assistant that lives everywhere, and it's not clear what platform-specific support needs to be done other than whipping up an app that can receive audio and read back results.
Definition... (Score:3)
Does "doubling down" for Google mean pixel model time until EOL will be half as long? Not sure what the multiplier is here.
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I'm not accepting blame for the horror that is Slashdot formatting.
Nor am I feeling any sting from your pathetic insults.
If you want to move the goalpost from "I hate pre-installed" to "I hate annoying pre-installed", be my guest. I respond to what I read, and I don't backpedal after you do.
platform-specific support (Score:3)
> it's not clear what platform-specific support needs to be done other than whipping up an app that can receive audio and read back results.
The Assistant feature on my Fitbit watch is so bad as to be unusable.
Oddly the speakerphone works (I tried it once) so the hardware is fine (microphone and speaker) but there must be some bizzare bluetooth stack that doesn't just act like an Android microphone.
Maybe it's not worth fixing. I found it to not be worth using.
Cutting back support? (Score:3)
Google not consumer company (Score:3)
Google becoming more involved in the consumer end, forcing design decisions based on ad revenue, will kill the Android phone.
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I see you have never used a Pixel phone. They are the most ad-free experience out there. Other manufacturers take money to pre-install shitty apps you don't want like Facebook and Netflix. The Google apps that they come with are mostly ad-free, and don't nag you to pay for services. Google give you more free cloud storage than Apple does (15GB vs 5GB) so there is less upsell there too.
There are some ads in certain places, like in the Play Store app. Photos tries to sell you prints sometimes. Gmail, Assistan
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I forget that SMS spam is legal in the US. I don't get any because I live in the UK.
I'll never buy another pixel phone (Score:2)
Re:I'll never buy another pixel phone (Score:4, Informative)
What I don't understand is why Google doesn't use their very own Motorola division to make decent Pixel phones
Well, probably because they sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo [wikipedia.org] in 2014.
The first Pixel phone was released in 2016. So besides that...
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Re: I'll never buy another pixel phone (Score:2)
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Google Needs to Maintain Ecosystem (Score:2)
Doubling down... until they dropped it (Score:5, Insightful)
When Google can drop even Stadia, their gaming platform, what else they won't drop?
Heck, even Microsoft stood by their XBox platform. I think even the SEGA Saturn lasted longer than Stadia.
Google don't even have the grit keep one console through its full life cycle even though they have no lack of profit, how could anyone rely on Google for anything except as an interesting toy to play for a while? And "an interesting toy to play for a while" seemed to be just the attitude Google have towards their products.
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1 games needed to be ported to stadua so pitifully cataloge at start.
2 no possibility to take existing library from steam/epic/whatever to stadia, evry game gad to be re purchached
3: far from everybody lives close to a google dc and rtt is rather critical for some games.
4: people struggle with flaky an/or slow( and sometimes even metered connections)
Yea not exactly a glowing endorsement if stadia is it, Googles habit of killing
Google needs to work on Android support (Score:3)
Remember, Google bought Android because it was afraid of the dominance of Apple and iOS cutting them off from the ad market.
So maybe perhaps what Google needs to do is stop the silly 2+1 year support and offer ongoing support for their phones and encourage their partners to do the same.
Because Google is making their own chips now, there's no reason why it should only get 2 years of updates and a year of security updates beyond that.
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Pixel 6 and later phones will get security updates for at least 5 years.
https://support.google.com/pix... [google.com]
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Unfortunately they only make the SoC, not the modem. They are as reliant as everyone else on the modem suppliers providing drivers for older models and newer versions of Android.
It's actually quite expensive to do, because modems are heavily regulated in order to prevent problems with the cellular networks. One bad device can screw up cell reception for hundreds, even thousands of people. They have to test the actual emissions from the modem, and it's immunity to noise, every time they update the driver.
Goo
Good. (Score:2)
why is samsung declining? (Score:2)